3 Review(s)

A statistician offers his insights on miraculous and improbable phenomena in David Hand’s The Improbability Principle: Why coincidences, miracles and rare events happen all the time. Summary of the Book David Hand discusses why miraculous events happen more frequently than we expect and why we have every right to expect them to happen. He applies the principles of probability, gambling and coincidences to reveal how and why improbable events occur. He brings together a collection of irregular events which are often thought unexplainable and reveals how mathematics can be harnessed to study them. He discusses what the Bible code and Shakespeare have in common, how to win a lottery and how Apple’s song shuffling algorithm isn’t all as random as it seems. To add fuel to the fire, he also discusses why lightning can, in fact, strike twice. About David J. Hand David J. Hand is an English academic and mathematician. He is the emeritus professor of mathematics and senior research investigator at the Imperial College London. He has also written The Information Generation: How Data Rules Our World and Statistics: A Very Short Introduction.